Presently, almost every medical laboratory has some form of a Laboratory Information System (LIS) to collect and manage patient test data. To date, however, no emphasis has been placed on developing such systems to operate in a manner that is user friendly or intuitive. To the contrary, they have typically been difficult to operate, requiring the operator to be familiar with many commands and procedures. For example, when analyzing patient test data, the operator was required to manually validate test results by manually checking exceptions against historical instrument performance and/or patient data. Thus, much of the validation process was left to individual operator discretion and experience.
Recently many medical laboratories have added Laboratory Automation Systems (LAS) to control the processing of biological samples. Again, however, these systems have not been particularly user friendly, for example, only providing error messages rather than directing the user to take appropriate corrective action. In addition, when present, the LAS has in the past been operated as an independent system from the LIS, providing little or no integration. Further, many systems required individual control systems for each biomedical analyzer instrument. Thus, laboratories having more that one instrument required multiple, independent controls.